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Posts tagged with SYRIA

During a recent broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al Tahrir, the anchor Rania Badawy alerted viewers to what she called video evidence which “suggests that what is happening in Syria today was premeditated.” She then presented an 80-second clip from an episode of “The Simpsons” first broadcast in early 2001 and later dubbed into French and posted on YouTube.

After screening the animated clip — a parody of a music video that includes images of bombs being dropped on fighters in Middle Eastern dress — the anchor pointed out that the cartoon soldiers drawn in 2001 were pictured in a jeep decorated with a version of the Syrian flag that opposition protesters and rebels started waving in 2011. “The flag was created before the events took place,” Ms. Badawy asserted. “That’s why people are saying on Facebook that this is a conspiracy — in 2001, there was no such thing as the flag of the Syrian opposition.”

While the anchor called the inclusion of the flag in an episode of the cartoon a mystery — “How it reached this animated video nobody knows, and this has aroused a debate on the social networks” — she insisted that the image “raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions and about when this global conspiracy began.” Read more…

Video by a Syrian media activist from Kafr Zita on April 18, showing people suffering from a choking ailment that medical experts said was caused by chlorine gas attacks.

Syrian activists have been posting multiple videos in the past few weeks showing civilians at medical facilities in the village of Kafr Zita coughing and struggling to breathe, with the narrators during the footage identifying the cause of their condition as coming from the use of chlorine gas bombs.

The United States and France have said they are taking seriously accusations that Syrian government forces dropped such bombs in the village, and on Tuesday, as my colleague Nick Cumming Bruce reported, the group that monitors compliance with the treaty banning chemical weapons said that it was sending a mission to Syria to “establish the facts.”

Updated, 5:55 p.m. | The Turkish government blocked access to YouTube on Thursday, after an audio recording was uploaded to the platform in which the foreign minister and senior military and intelligence officials could be heard discussing the security situation in Syria.

Several Turks posted images of the blocked site on Twitter, and a spokeswoman for Google, which owns the video-sharing platform, said in a statement: “We’re seeing reports that some users are not able to access YouTube in Turkey. There is no technical issue on our side and we’re looking into the situation.”

As the English-language Hurriyet Daily News reports, Turkey’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the audio was recorded during “a top-secret meeting in the foreign minister’s office.” The conversation concerned plans to secure a site of historical significance to Turks in a part of northern Syria under the control of Islamist militants. Officials insisted, however, that the audio had been “distorted” through editing before being posted online. Read more…

A photograph of food distribution in a Damascus refugee camp for Palestinians released by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in January.Credit UNRWA, via Associated Press

A spokesman for the United Nations agency that provides assistance to Palestinian refugees rejected claims that an arresting image of thousands of people waiting for food distribution on a ruined street in Damascus recently had been digitally altered.

Chris Gunness, the spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, said in a statement on Tuesday that the photograph — which is being used in a social media campaign to draw attention to the suffering of refugees trapped by fighting in a camp in the Syrian capital — has not “been ‘photoshopped’ or tampered with in any way. It is entirely genuine.”

A British man, dressed for martyrdom in a screen shot from video said to have been recorded in Syria last week before a suicide attack.Credit

Peering into the camera and shaking his head slowly, a British man in Syria, dressed in the white robe worn by suicide bombers, apologized for being at a loss for words. “Sheikh, I can’t speak,” the man said to the militant acting as his translator in video apparently recorded last week, just before he got behind the wheel of an explosives-laden truck. “My tongue’s got like a knot in it,” he explained. “Tell him I can’t speak.”

Video said to have been recorded last week in Syria showed a Briton just before a suicide attack.

The man, whose appearance matches that of Abdul Waheed Majeed, a 41-year-old father of three from the English county of West Sussex who traveled to Syria recently to work with refugee children, seemed to be politely declining a request to speak in his own martyrdom video. “What I say should come from the heart,” he demurred. “I can’t do it.” Read more…

One of the residential demolition videos used by Human Rights Watch for its report. Recorded by activists in the Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus on Sept. 27, 2012.

The Syrian government has used explosives and bulldozers to demolish thousands of residential buildings to punish civilians in neighborhoods where the army has clashed with opposition fighters, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Thursday.

It used satellite imagery, statements from witnesses, and video and photographic evidence to document seven cases in which the government razed buildings between July 2012 and July 2013. Two of the neighborhoods are in Hama, and five neighborhoods or areas are in or near Damascus.

The total building area demolished is equivalent to about 200 soccer fields. Many were apartment blocks, some as many as eight stories high, leading to the displacement of thousands of civilians, the group said.

“Wiping entire neighborhoods off the map is not a legitimate tactic of war,” said Ole Solvang, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “These unlawful demolitions are the latest additions to a long list of crimes committed by the Syrian government.”Read more…

"Half of Jihad is media." A Dutch jihadist's Tumblr photograph of the weapons he uses in Syria: His knife, his gun and his Instagram account.Credit Battlefields of Syria/Tumblr

Last summer, a Dutch public television producer scanning the Internet for information on foreign fighters in Syria stumbled on something he had never seen before: Instagram photos of a man wearing the uniform of the Royal Netherlands Army who appeared to be fighting alongside Islamist rebels against government forces.

GENEVA — As we reported, a tenuous peace conference in Geneva between the Syrian opposition and the government has yet to produce concrete results, and on Monday, the third day of face-to-face talks, a communiqué released by President Bashar al-Assad’s government showed just how far apart they are from any agreement.

The United Nations special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, convened another session of the talks, in which he was said to be bringing an international expert involved in drafting the Geneva I protocols to resolve differences of interpretation. The June 2012 agreement known as Geneva I calls for a fully empowered transitional governing body to be formed by “mutual consent.”

The opposition has demanded that the government formally confirm that it accepts the protocol, but on Monday the Syrian government made its own interpretation clear by submitting what it called “basic elements for a political communiqué.”Read more…

A CNN interview with experts who reviewed graphic post-mortem photographs said to show the bodies of prisoners who died in the custody of Syrian security forces.

Last Updated, Wednesday, Jan. 22 | Thousands of post-mortem photographs of scarred, emaciated corpses, provided to the Syrian opposition by a man who describes himself as a defector from the security forces of President Bashar al-Assad, appear to offer “direct evidence” of torture and execution on a mass scale, a team of legal and forensic experts concluded in a report made public on Monday.

The experts reported that the 26,948 images, smuggled out of Syria by a man who says he was a crime-scene photographer for the military police, appeared to be evidence of the killing of as many as 11,000 prisoners, provided by “a truthful and credible witness.” Read more…

As my colleagues Hwaida Saad and Rick Gladstone report, Syrian opposition activists said that an alliance of seven rebel groups launched attacks across northern Syria on Friday against the jihadist militants who call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — a powerful Qaeda affiliate that includes foreign fighters.

Video and images posted online by activists appeared to show that anti-ISIS protesters took to the streets in the city of Aleppo and in rural areas near the Turkish border that remain outside government control.

A small number of protesters even gathered in the village of Kafranbel, where ISIS militants kidnapped eight media activists and destroyed an independent radio station last week, according to Raed Fares, the director of the town’s media center, who is currently on a speaking tour in the United States.

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The Lede is a blog that remixes national and international news stories -- adding information gleaned from the Web or gathered through original reporting -- to supplement articles in The New York Times and draw readers in to the global conversation about the news taking place online.

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Six young Iranians were arrested and forced to repent on state television Tuesday for the grievous offense of proclaiming themselves to be “Happy in Tehran,” in a homemade music video they posted on YouTube.Read more…